Smoking

The disposable vape ban has changed nothing

7 June 2025 9:00 am

I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief when I bought my first non-disposable Elf Bar last weekend, ahead of…

Smoking is sexy again

15 February 2025 9:00 am

It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and…

How we became addicted to vaping

6 July 2024 9:00 am

For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the pub…

Why Mummy smokes

20 April 2024 9:00 am

It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that…

Diary

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Giving up smoking was an absolute doddle

8 October 2022 9:00 am

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces…

Smoke and mirrors

23 July 2022 9:00 am

I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…

Saint Jacinda’s war on fags

10 December 2021 1:20 am

It is a curious irony that the West’s leading progressive icon is probably the most authoritarian leader in the free world…

Fit of the vapours

31 July 2021 9:00 am

The WHO’s fervent campaign against e-cigarettes

Covid has killed off our civil liberties

17 October 2020 9:00 am

It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…

Leave my cigarettes out of this

11 April 2020 9:00 am

The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in…

How many Britons now vape?

21 September 2019 9:00 am

Talking Turkey David Cameron again accused the Leave campaign of ‘lying’ about the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. A…

Dear Mary: How much should I tip a black cab driver?

7 September 2019 9:00 am

Q. We have near neighbours in the country with whom I would not wish to fall out for all sorts…

Dear Mary: How do I stop people cadging cigarettes off me?

8 June 2019 9:00 am

Q. My mother died a few months ago. Her collection of colourful clothes, hats, shoes and an immense amount of…

The truth about air quality? It’s the best (and cleanest) in living memory

18 May 2019 9:00 am

We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health…

How smoking saved my life

3 November 2018 9:00 am

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in…

Letters

13 July 2017 1:00 pm

Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the…

Being anti-smoking damages your mental health

8 July 2017 9:00 am

I lit a cigarette in an open-air car park a couple of years ago as I was walking to the…

Warning: top-performing funds are highly likely to contain tobacco

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and…

Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets

14 May 2016 9:00 am

Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…

Live fast, die not too old

9 April 2016 9:00 am

At 77, it is clear to me that increased longevity can be a curse rather than a blessing

Long life

23 January 2016 9:00 am

Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but…

She was Ariadne to my Theseus

12 December 2015 9:00 am

My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their…

The smoking diary of Gregor Hens

12 December 2015 9:00 am

The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will…

Dear Sirs and Madams

4 July 2015 9:00 am

In praise of the old-fashioned letter-writer